Six In The Morning

Egypt leaders caught in the middle in anti-US protests

　'We are taking the heat from both sides,' a Muslim Brotherhood spokesman says

By DAVID D. KIRKPATRICK, HELENE COOPER and MARK LANDLER
Following a blunt phone call from President Obama, Egyptian leaders scrambled Thursday to try to repair the country’s alliance with Washington, tacitly acknowledging that they erred in their response to the attack on the United States Embassy by seeking to first appease anti-American domestic opinion without offering a robust condemnation of the violence. Set off by anger at an American-made video ridiculing the Prophet Muhammad, the attacks on the embassy put President Mohamed Morsi and the Muslim Brotherhood in a squeeze between the need to stand with Washington against the attackers and the demands of many Egyptians to defy Washington and defend Islam, a senior Brotherhood official acknowledged.

Revealed: inside story of US envoy's assassination
Exclusive: America 'was warned of embassy attack but did nothing'

KIM SENGUPTA FRIDAY 14 SEPTEMBER 2012
The killings of the US ambassador to Libya and three of his staff were likely to have been the result of a serious and continuing security breach, The Independent can reveal. American officials believe the attack was planned, but Chris Stevens had been back in the country only a short while and the details of his visit to Benghazi, where he and his staff died, were meant to be confidential.

Brutal Elephant Slaughter Funds African Conflicts
Rebels and militias across Africa have discovered the illegal trade in elephant ivory. Coveted in Asia, their tusks bring in handsome sums that are funding wars across the continent. Many game wardens hardly stand a chance against the slaughter.

By Horand Knaup and Jan Puhl
The eight game wardens from the Kenya Wildlife Service spent hours lying in wait between bushes and tree trunks. An informant had given them a tip that poachers would show up at this particular spot sometime in the afternoon. When the poachers did indeed appear, a wild gunfight broke out that lasted some 40 minutes and left one Somali poacher dead next to his military-grade, fully automatic assault rifle. The five others, some of them injured, were able to slip away into the bushes, and another normal day's work for the game wardens of Tsavo East National Park drew to a close.

Straw puts blame on Thatcher for cover-up
The Irish Times - Friday, September 14, 2012

MARK HENNESSY, London Editor
CONSERVATIVES ROUNDED furiously on former Labour minister, Mr Jack Straw, who yesterday laid some of the blame for the cover-up into the Hillsborough football stadium disaster at the door of former prime minister Margaret Thatcher. The independent inquiry into Hillsborough published on Tuesday showed that Mrs Thatcher feared the impact on South Yorkshire police, and the police generally, of criticism from the original Taylor investigation into the tragedy, which left 96 dead. In addition, it was clear that Downing Street under Thatcher knew that some of the police statements made at the time had been falsified, or doctored – with one official then describing such conduct as “depressingly familiar”.

Mr Blowback rising in Benghazi
THE ROVING EYE

By Pepe Escobar
"Daddy, what is blowback?" Here's a fable to tell our children, by the fire, in a not so-distant post-apocalyptic, dystopian future. Once upon a time, during George "Dubya" Bush's "war on terra", the Forces of Good in Afghanistan captured - and duly tortured - one evil terrorist, Abu Yahya al-Libi. Abu Yahya al-Libi was, of course, Libyan. He slaved three years in the bowels of Bagram prison near Kabul, but somehow managed to escape that supposedly impregnable fortress in July 2005. At the time, the Forces of Good were merrily in bed with Colonel Muammar Gaddafi in Libya - whose intelligence services, to the delight of the Bush administration, were doing their nastiest to exterminate or at least isolate al-Qaeda-style Salafi-jihadis of the al-Libi kind.

16-year-old Mexican hit man, 'El Nino,' linked to 50 murders
A 16-year-old confessed to Mexican police that he took part in executions while working for a drug cartel.

By Reuters
Mexican prosecutors said Thursday they were investigating a 16-year-old suspected hit man who was believed to have participated in at least 50 murders while working for a drug gang. A spokesman for prosecutors in the northeastern state of Sinaloa said the teenager, identified as Francisco Miguel N., was part of a gang known as Los Mazatlecos, a criminal group attached to the Beltran Leyva drugs cartel. Police arrested the teen for carrying a loaded gun and drugs. He later confessed to working as a hit man for the group, local prosecutors said in a statement.